Elisabeth Wandeler-Deck and Karin Derungs
Photo: Dirk Skiba
Elisabeth Wandeler-Deck, born in 1939, lives in Zurich. She reveals a great affinity for music in her writing. As an improvising musician and with her texts, she is a member of the improvisation quartet bunte hörschlaufen. Her texts are often guided by sound, giving the impression of an improvisation on paper – an improvisation, of course, that reveals precise structures. With her anarchic approach to writing, the trained architect, sociologist and Gestalt analyst repeatedly explores the most diverse thematic and formal fields. She publishes her texts in book form, in literary journals, on the Internet as narrative prose, picture text works and scenic works. Her poetry publications have titles such as ‘(Gelächter über dem linken Fuss)’, ‘Turbulenzen an der Luftschnittstelle’, ‘ANFÄNGE, ANFANGEN gefolgt von UND’, ‘arioso - archive des zukommens’. Most recently, ‘TAGUMTAGKAIRO’ was published – 1 photo, 1 poem, 1 piece of prose of the same length for each date. In 2013, she received the Basel Poetry Prize for her lyrical oeuvre, and in 2017, she was awarded a year of work by the City of Zurich for ‘Visby infra-ordinaire’.
Photo: Walter Derungs
Karin Derungs, born in 1981, studied fine arts in Bern and Basel. She writes and paints. The creation of her lyrical narrative text ‘Tiki’ was supported by the Literature Committee BS/BL via literature mentoring with Michael Stauffer. During Buchbasel 2018, in the ‘jung und wild’ category, she participated in a reading of the winning entries for the Literaturautomaten project, featuring works like Hinterlassenschaft Wärme and Schächteli (Edition). Her anonymous text entry ‘in ogni dove’ for the literary competition Literaturland was performed by actors at two readings in Herisau and Teufen. Should it be the somewhat bizarre-looking first contribution? Or would you prefer one of the following more pleasing texts? wrote the Tüüfener Post.
Project
Her literary project was called ‘Maku Brüche’. It was meant to interweave poems and shorter prose texts so that they can be fanned out, so that everything corresponds with everything, sometimes secretly, sometimes obviously. The resulting book contained offshoots into concrete poetry. Much of it explicitly oscillated between sense and nonsense, searching for the limits of meaning. A central cornerstone was the musical approach to language. The sound and precision of the language should be honed and the smallest word shifts discussed. Another aim of the mentoring program was to consolidate the author’s own productive textual criticism.
